What do Martin Luther King, Jr. and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have in common?
I’m not sure either. But enough, apparently, that Dolores Huerta, Duke’s keynote speaker for the Jan. 17 MLK celebrations and an honorary chair in the Democratic Socialists of America, thought it fit to adoringly compare their commitment to economic justice.
The aside, in which Huerta—also co-founder of United Farm Workers and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and—seemed to question the fact that “some people” consider Chavez a dictator, was emblematic of what was on the whole a shrill and ideological talk. This is the same Chavez, mind you, who just this week shut down a cable TV station over its criticism of his presidency. If this if the future of MLK commemorations at Duke, we should be concerned indeed.
Yes, Huerta’s partisan tone was gratuitous and offensive. But it was also a lost opportunity to remind the Duke community of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the tremendous accomplishments of MLK. Some of Huerta’s remarks seemed to run in the face of MLK’s message of racial unity, of his want to be “the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.” That University organizers chose to spotlight Huerta, then, with her belligerent talk, should set off alarms for anyone fearful that a holiday meant to commemorate unity and racial progress is being politicized.
Painfully, Huerta was not being ironic when she lambasted those who “try to divide us.” Even as she preached our common humanity, her own words were too often littered with divisive and sometimes hateful rhetoric. A first principle of any undergraduate education should be to resist the temptation to demonize those we disagree with. Yet segments of Huerta’s talk often sounded like a run-on string of ad hominem attacks.
Among some other gems from her lecture, Huerta resorted to the hyperbolic in describing the enforcement of immigration laws in Arizona as a “campaign of terror against illegal immigrants,” where “anyone who is beige or brown is stopped and asked for documents.” Huerta spoke of the need to aggressively “redistribute the wealth in our country” and the minimum wage, she added, “should be over $30 an hour.” And take note: Conservative talk show hosts, like “Glenn Beck, [Rush] Limbaugh, [Bill] O’Reilly and [Sean] Hannity are evil.”
At least Huerta’s message was clear and simple: Forget what you ever learned about how good people can disagree on matters of substance—if you’re not a socialist who believes in economically reorganizing American society, then there is something downright hateful about you.
The kicker? In calling for a broad alliance of citizens to rise up against economic injustice, Huerta thought it appropriate to direct her appeal to “white men of conscience”—as opposed to white men in general—suggesting, somehow, that white males are uniquely racist and oppressive. These kinds of categorical racial snap judgments are precisely what MLK fought against when he sought to change not only our laws but our culture. Clearly, Huerta did not get the memo.
But perhaps she was not supposed to. It seems that with this year’s keynote talk, the MLK commemoration planners have turned the occasion into an opportunity to vent the political frustrations of the campus’ radical left. Far be it from me to suggest that Duke has no place to hear out someone like Huerta and her views. But there is a time and place for everything. The annual MLK keynote is not it.
MLK’s legacy is neither black nor white, neither liberal nor conservative. It belongs to us—all of us—as Americans. Instead of using the annual MLK keynote talk as an opportunity to unite the Duke community in reflecting on racial progress and civil rights, the University turned this year’s event into a patronizing leftist diatribe. This narrow-minded approach, so willfully and transparently ideological—denigrates the message of inclusion and hope that was at the core of MLK’s beliefs.
Luckily, past MLK speakers have not been so thoughtless—the keynote last year, CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien, for example, was insightful and measured. So perhaps this is an isolated incident and will be looked back on a year from now as a sad chapter in a long string of otherwise positive and unifying MLK keynotes.
This year’s talk, though well attended, visibly lacked a sizeable student contingent. I suspect that this was not a coincidence. MLK day is a valuable occasion to reflect on the fact that the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement took place barely more than 50 years ago. Organizers should keep in mind that it is this aspect of MLK’s legacy that is most powerful to a student body that has reaped the fruit of the nation’s racial progress. If next year’s keynote speaker can manage to remember that, you can bet Duke students will, too.
Vikram Srinivasan is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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